Mass Murder: America's Tragic Trend

October 20, 1991|By New York Times

BOSTON — The killing of 23 people at a Texas cafeteria Wednesday is only the latest evidence that mass murder has rapidly increased in the past decade, both in frequency and in the number of victims killed in individual attacks.

In the view of experts, mass murder is a peculiarly American phenomenon that has grown out of the proliferation of guns in this country, the disintegration of traditional American society and, more recently, the decline in the standard of living in recent years as millions of well-paying jobs have been lost.

Of the 10 largest mass murders in American history, in fact, eight have occurred since 1980, according to a widely recognized expert, James Fox of Northeastern University in Boston.

And while mass murderers are part of a larger picture of increasing violence in American society, they also represent a distinctly identifiable subset of murderers, a group whose menacing characteristics are sometimes recognized by neighbors and friends after the tragedies occur but whose explosions into murder cannot be anticipated.

In the case of the shootings in Killeen, Texas, the killer, George Hennard, evidently harbored a strong dislike for women.

Fox said there are now an average of two mass murders a month in this country. Fox defines a mass murder as four killings or more.

Most are in Texas, California and Florida, heavily populated states with a heavy influx of migrants searching for new jobs or families after disappointments or frustrations elsewhere.

It is these kind of unhappy, angry people, almost always middle-aged white men in their 30s or 40s, who are most likely to become mass murderers, said Fox, the dean of the College of Criminal Justice at Northeastern. He also is co-author of Mass Murder, which is widely considered the most authoritative study of this type of crime.

Typically mass murderers are men with no previous criminal record or history of mental illness, said Dr. Marvin Wolfgang, professor of criminology and law at the University of Pennsylvania, and their killings ''are not really planned.''

Like Hennard, they may be rude to their neighbors and have occasional outbursts that frighten people, but that is true of thousands of people around the country and offers no clue that they will become mass murderers, Fox said.

''What is really striking is our complete inability to predict this kind of violence,'' said Deborah Denno, a criminologist and an associate professor of law at Fordham University.

What seems to happen with men who become mass murderers, Fox said, is that after a prolonged period of being lonely, frustrated and filled with rage, ''There is some precipitating event, often a catastrophe in their lives,'' which drives them over the edge.